Cuts in place, no end in sight

Reductions start to appear

WASHINGTON — As spending cuts began to spread slowly from Washington across the land Saturday, political leaders stuck to their budgetary guns and offered no hope of a solution soon.

Hours after President Barack Obama ordered the cuts Friday night, the impact of sequestration, as the cuts are known, appeared to be as varied as the thousands of federal programs, big and small, that now have shrunken pots of money from which to draw.

In Baltimore, the mayor called for an emergency Cabinet meeting to discuss the reductions in federal money and their impact on a city that already has a projected deficit of $750 million over the next decade.

At research universities, administrators sent e-mails to faculty members and students warning that changes were coming.

The Air Force Thunderbirds, the elite team of F-16 pilots who perform at air shows around the country, announced that all of their shows had been canceled starting April 1.

And federal officials began sending letters to state governors, informing them of smaller grants. Shaun Donovan, the secretary of housing and urban development, wrote to Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, “You can expect reductions totaling approximately $35 million.”

Obama formally triggered spending cuts that will reach across the breadth of the federal government after he failed to persuade congressional Republicans to replace them with

a mix of cuts and tax increases.

In a 70-page report to Congress accompanying the order and detailing the reductions — agency by agency and program by program — Jeffrey Zients, Obama’s budget director, called them “deeply destructive to national security, domestic investments and core government functions.”

As some Americans fumed at Washington’s inability to head off mandated spending cuts with some kind of budget deal, Obama and congressional Republicans refused Saturday to concede any culpability.

There were no indications that either side was wavering from entrenched positions that for weeks had prevented progress on a deal to find a way out: Republicans refusing any deal with more tax revenue and Democrats snubbing any deal without it.

“None of this is necessary,” Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address Saturday and blamed Republicans for the mess.

In the Republican radio response, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington state, the chairwoman of the Republican conference, also called the cuts “devastating” to America, but said that Republicans in the House would not yield on the issue of taxes. “Spending is the problem, which means cutting spending is the solution.”

With the nation facing reduced federal services and Washington in gridlock, one encouraging fact was lost: On paper at least, Obama and Congress have reduced projected deficits by nearly $4 trillion over a decade — the widely embraced goal for stabilizing the national debt.

The new spending cuts, totaling about $1 trillion through 2023, come on top of $1.5 trillion in reductions that Obama and Congress committed to in 2011, mainly from the accord that averted the nation’s first debt default.

Nearly $ 700 billion more will come from tax increases on wealthy Americans, the product of the brawl in December over Bush- era tax cuts, and another $700 billion is expected to be saved in projected interest on the reduced debt.

If the latest cuts stick, the two parties will have achieved nearly the full amount of deficit reduction over the next decade that economists and market analysts have promoted.